2023-12-18 18:19:14
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The NASA rover “Perseverance” provides exciting insights into the history of water on Mars. The trail leads to a crater that was once a lake.
San Francisco – When the NASA rover “Perseverance” was supposed to land on Mars, a special place was chosen: the Jezero Crater. “We chose Jezero Crater as a landing site because the orbital images show a delta – clear evidence that the crater was once filled by a large lake,” explains Ken Farley, the Perseverance mission project scientist. in a NASA statement. The rover has now been on the red planet for more than 1,000 Mars days and has focused intensively on an ancient river delta in the crater.
Thanks to the Mars rover’s ability to analyze the surrounding rock in detail, the research team behind “Perseverance” can now reconstruct the water history of the Jezero crater quite accurately, as NASA presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco . Farley is convinced: A lake represents a potentially habitable environment and stones from a delta are ideal “for anchoring signs of ancient life in the form of fossils in the geological record.”
Mars rover Perservance (here an illustration from NASA) landed safely on Mars on February 18, 2021. © NASA/afp
Crater on Mars was formed by an asteroid impact
The scientist emphasizes that the research “has pieced together the geological history of the crater after thorough exploration and recorded its lake and river phase from beginning to end.” According to research, the Mars crater was formed by an asteroid impact almost four billion years ago. After the Perseverance rover arrived in February 2021, the research team quickly determined that the crater floor was made of igneous rock formed by magma underground or volcanic activity on the surface.
Hundreds of millions of years after its formation, the first river emerged in the crater – this is indicated by sandstone and mudstone that “Perseverance” discovered. Above it lie salty mudstones that indicate a shallow lake formed by evaporation. According to scientists, this lake was said to have been 30 meters deep and up to 35 kilometers in diameter. Later Fast-flowing water brought rocks from outside into Jezero Crater and distributed them there.
NASA rover took 23 samples on Mars
Libby Ives from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which leads the Perseverance mission, said: “We were able to see these chapters of Jezero’s history in broad strokes from images taken from orbit, but we had to use Perseverance to see the crater ‘look up close to understand the timeline in detail’.
Artist’s impression: This is what the Jezero crater, where the NASA rover “Perseverance” landed on Mars, might once have looked like: Well filled with water. © NASA/JPL
So far, the NASA rover has taken rock samples from 23 different locations in the Jezero Crater and stored them on Mars for a possible later retrieval operation. For example, one sample contains phosphate – an element often associated with life as we know it on Earth. Another sample contains a large amount of fine-grained silica – a material known to preserve ancient fossils on Earth.
Research wants to find fossils on Mars
“On Earth, this fine-grained silica is often found in places that were once sandy,” explains JPL’s Morgan Cable. “This is the type of environment in which the remains of ancient life on Earth could be preserved and later found.” The research team is using the Perseverance rover to search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars. The mission also characterizes the geology of the red planet and is intended to find out more about its past climate.
Cable is optimistic about further exploration of Mars: “We have ideal conditions to find signs of ancient life, as we find carbonates and phosphates, which indicate a watery, habitable environment, as well as silica, which is excellent for preservation.” . (tab)
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